Non-profit organizations run impactful initiatives that help local communities. However, their success y depends on the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
The campaigns help woo potential donors, volunteers, and supporters who make generous donations to run the organizations.
Marketing for nonprofits presents unique challenges. Unlike profit organizations with fully-fledged marketing budgets, nonprofits rely on donations or supporters.
As such, there’s a need to leverage effective marketing strategies to achieve the desired goals without spreading their teams too thin. Here’s how they do it:
What is Nonprofit Marketing?
Nonprofit marketing refers to the marketing tactics used to amplify an organization’s mission, attract volunteers, and solicit donations.
This form of marketing creates awareness about the organization’s initiatives, helping supporters understand where they’re investing their monies.
The organizations leverage various platforms to reach potential supporters, including websites and social media.
And unlike traditional media, which communicates the same message to its audience, nonprofit marketing offers personalized marketing experiences.
Supporters expect interactions with nonprofits to be highly personalized and intuitive, compelling marketing teams to create great online experiences that can connect with supporters.
Why NonProfit Marketing
Nonprofits marketing is necessary due to the following reasons:
Solicit Support from Volunteers
Marketing helps communicate your need for volunteers. This way, people eager to support your mission can contact you. It also indicates that you want the community involved in the initiative.
Creates Awareness
Marketing is a great way to attract like-minded persons to support your initiatives.
Sometimes, supporters are willing to participate in nonprofit initiatives but lack awareness about their whereabouts.
Marketing also provides an opportunity for nonprofits to know more about the community and share ideas about their mission.
Raise Funds
Nonprofit marketing helps solicit funds to support the organization’s initiatives. It creates a platform for it to communicate the community’s needs and how they plan to meet them.
In the long run, marketing helps you solicit more support and resources to help you fund your mission.
Helps Set Up Donor Memberships and Recurring Donations
Traditionally, nonprofits needed to fundraise every so often to support their initiatives.
A good marketing plan helps set up a more reliable donation system, e.g., a monthly giving program or a donation membership.
These platforms have proved to raise more money than monthly or annual fundraisers.
In fact, they have increased in popularity among supporters because they’re more predictable and provide a more effective method for consistent donation.
Reports show a monthly donor contributes up to $656 annually compared to a one-time donor who gives $128.
How to Create a Nonprofit Marketing Plan
Developing a nonprofit marketing plan isn’t too different from a profit-marketing plan.
However, the audiences differ because a nonprofit mainly solicits support from corporations, volunteers, and well-to-do individuals. So, how do you go about developing a marketing plan?
Start by Defining Your Marketing Goals
The main objective of nonprofits is to transform local communities. It could be to educate young women in the community, protect the welfare of street urchins, etc.
Whatever the initiative is, you want to commit to transforming the organization’s mission into actionable goals.
Your team could brainstorm marketing ideas to accomplish them, e.g., hosting events to create awareness around the subject, visiting corporate companies around the area, or sending newsletters to your target audience.
Then convert the ideas to SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) goals.
For example, the team may attract monthly donors who can raise 50% of the capital required to educate young women in the community through social media.
Study the Audience
Marketing for nonprofits targets different groups of people, from corporations to donors, constituents, and volunteers.
As such, studying each audience to understand their behaviour, history, and motivation is essential.
For example, if targeting a corporation, you want to research if educating young women is part of their CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiative.
Such insights will help you:
- Estimate the average donation from the target audience
- The kind of message to curate for your marketing campaign
Curate a Message
Next, develop the key message that resonates with the audience. It should communicate the information your audience wants to hear, remember, and share about the organization.
Curating this message is essential before deploying your marketing strategies because it helps you craft unique messages for each audience.
The message must be clear, lean into the mission, and include a call to action.
Example
Say you’re crafting a marketing message for donors to help you educate young women in the community.
“You can help us educate more young women in the community by donating to support their placement in schools, tuition fees, and upkeep.”
Select Suitable Marketing Strategies
Marketers often jump into this step overlooking the first three, yet they’re equally important.
Knowing your target audience, for example, helps you select the most suitable marketing channel.
You’re more likely to get the attention of a corporation’s CEO through email marketing than through a social media post.
Similarly, a volunteer will likely come across an ad on social media. You must plan meticulously to ensure the marketing strategy is effective.
Share the Message
Then, use the channels to share the message. Be sure to tailor it to the respective audience and channel.
For example, you could use an Instagram ad to enlighten an audience about the impact of recurring donations compared to annual donations and send a newsletter to a CEO addressing the same topic.
Analyze the Performance
Lastly, the effectiveness of the marketing strategy will be evaluated. Did you achieve your goal(s)? If not, what could you do to achieve it?
Suppose you wanted more donors to sign up for recurring giving plans, and only a few signed up; you want to find out why they didn’t.
It could be that the marketing strategy didn’t reach most of your target audience, or the signup process was long and tedious.
Tools like Google Analytics and analytical features on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram help analyze all such possibilities to improve your next marketing campaign.
Conclusion
While nonprofits don’t operate for profit, they still benefit from the sensitization strategic marketing brings.
This guide can help you develop a marketing plan. But, if it’s still a hard nut to crack, enlist the help of a professional.
At Simpaul, we’ll help you develop a marketing plan and identify the most suitable channel for a specific target audience.
Having helped other nonprofits develop and run their marketing campaigns, you can count on us to deliver results. Call us today.
